The Need for Isolation

Throughout Taimanin Asagi, the central conflict of Asagi and Sakura is essentially for both sisters. Inducted into the larger world of the arena and its attendant sexual orders, they rebel in superegoic fashion against their own ability to integrate and work within its structures. Losing their will to resist so forcefully, they find themselves submitting with more ease than they believe themselves should be doing. Their higher mind reacts in horror at this, as they, in the same fashion of Buzzati’s Fort Bastiani, attempting to resist the rest of the mind falling into the orders and patterns around them. The comparison to Fort Bastiani shows the nature of desire. Desire recognizes in these lower orders as all desires truly does, a flow going through the person, with a source before and a destination beyond, which moves the person into passions and actions alien to themselves.

To call this superegoic is useful for the immediate consideration, but obscures the larger truth of this conflict. The layer of desire attempting to modify the desire is no less a desire and like the lower desire, it has no more relation to anything intrinsic to the person themselves. It too, is a desire with its own alien origin and destination, within with the person is occupied and modified, as a surge of water eroding a channel it flows down. Asagi and Sakura work desperately to make themselves not fall into the desires of their bodies and unconsciousnesses to accept the arena, but their martial desires to remain kunoichi has its own history of origin and was inflicted upon them in the same way, through their training and life’s progression, which built into them the warrior ideal.

Desire acts through people, from larger flows. In this way, humans are shown to be only ever partial in their individuality. As hatefully as the theorists of the self pursue their severing of the human with all ties around them, the human remains forever only an empty point, held together by forcefully created personhood-containers (a physical body, a golden light body), in a way revealed by even cursory investigations into any desire. As all things, even the supposedly meta-actions of the superego, are reducible to desire, all of the human is shown to be ephemeral and existing only in context. Humanity shows a spiritual codependency with other humans in this way, a codependency which can only be thought away with by positing universal archetypes pre-existing and pre-forming all thought or interaction.

For this reason, isolation is a vital part of mystic practice, practice to attain independence and freedom. When alone, an individual will can emerge. Humans are without personhood without any such effort. When alone, the unique set of influences can double back on itself and create a feedback loop of mutation that results in perpetually more freedom. The unique personhood is thus developed, in a way not seen in a personhood which exists only in context, as is the state of minimal effort and nature.